Director Paul Schrader has started shooting "The Canyons" with an original screenplay by Bret Easton Ellis.

It’s heartening to hear that the director Paul Schrader has now started shooting The Canyons (tagline: “It’s not The Hills”) from an original screenplay by Bret Easton Ellis, thanks in part to financing provided by the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. Schrader, Ellis and the film’s producer, Braxton Pope, had already put up a $100,000 budget but they went on to generate a further $60,000 by making this appeal through Kickstarter. The cast includes the underrated Lindsay Lohan and the porn actor James Deen, whose CV, regrettably unfamiliar to me, includes such promising titles as Hot For Teacher, Bobbi Violates San Francisco and Fuckenstein.

The consensus is that Bret Easton Ellis’s writing has not lent itself to a cinematic rendering. Ellis has been publicly critical of the adaptations of his first and third novels, Less Than Zero and American Psycho respectively, though it’s always worth keeping up with him on Twitter, where you can not only catch him making announcements about how The Canyons is shaping up (“gorgeous composition…Influence: Godard’s Contempt”) and lobbying to adapt Fifty Shades of Grey—you might also happen upon the odd, uncharacteristic note of contrition about his earlier broadsides. Only the other day, he tweeted: “Just caught some of Mary Harron’s American Psycho and was surprised how good it is. I’d been lightly dissing it but I’m wrong. Polanski...” [sic] (And the [sic] was not just for that dangling mention of Polanksi but for the phrase “I’m wrong”, not something you hear often from Ellis).

He was complimentary, though, about the 2002 film of his second novel, The Rules of Attraction, written and directed by Roger Avary. “Bret sneaked into an early screening,” Avary told me in 2003. “I was mortified. He’s not known to monitor what he says, and I had heard he didn’t like the other films based on his books. But he told me it was not only the best adaptation of his work, it was one of his favourite movies.”

Indeed, it brings a new and compassionate dimension to Ellis’s “difficult” second novel—“difficult” in this context meaning “like wading through a cesspool.” It wasn’t the drug-addled, vomit-soaked sex that rendered unpalatable Ellis’s induction into life on a fictional New England campus so much as the misanthropy: all human life was DOA. Avary translated Ellis’s despair into sensitivity, and included humour that wasn’t exclusively of the gallows variety. Everyone in the movie was still going to hell, but you sensed that Avary considered this a bad thing.

The director has had his own experience of the cesspool, having served eight months in prison for DUI and manslaughter. Now he is back at work, and his screenplays for two more Ellis adaptations are being championed—by Ellis. Avary’s film of Glamorama has been on the cards since long before his jail term; in 2005, he even made an as-yet-unseen “interim” movie, intended to act as a bridge between Rules and Glamorama. This expanded upon the virtuoso section midway through Rules when Avary absconded from the narrative for five minutes to follow a minor character named Victor on a hedonistic jaunt around Europe. The director and his actor, ex-model Kip Pardue, did it for real, partying hard over two weeks with Pardue in character as Avary trailed him with a DV camera from breakfast to bed. “Kip would bring girls back to the hotel room, they’d be making out. And beyond. I have no interest in making pornography. When I felt I’d got enough of what I needed, I’d go back to my room. There was no need to stick around until the final cigarette.”

Avary edited the 70 hours of Victor footage into an accompanying 2005 film called Glitterati, which has not yet been seen. But as well as Glamorama, Ellis is championing Avary’s script for his most accomplished novel, Lunar Park. They’re a good team: they understand each other. Avary coaxes out the easily-overlooked humanity in Ellis. And Ellis responds by doing the most helpful thing possible: not griping.

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.